Jordan didn't give a flip who liked him and who didn't. He wasn't there to make friends or join friends in Miami, he was there to win games and keep Barkley and Ewing from winning anything major. He's not the nicest guy either. All that made him so great.

Remember when Wade tore into LeBron with three-plus minutes remaining in Game 3? When he yelled at him for eight solid seconds? When there was genuine anger in his eyes? When he did it right on the court, right in front of the other players, right in front of 20,000 fans and 10 million TV viewers?

LeBron was never the same after that.

When was the last time anyone ever really yelled at LeBron James? You'd have to go back to high school, right? He just spent the past 10 years being coddled by everyone (teammates, coaches, agents, entourage members, yes-men, general managers, owners, media members, etc.). Imagine he was a little kid (which really, he might be to some degree), and imagine you were his father and didn't believe in yelling at your kids. Now, imagine your kid screwed up in his second-grade play and, for whatever reason, you broke character, snapped, and berated him for eight seconds in front of everyone. How would he handle that? Poorly, right? He'd pretend it didn't affect him, but the more he thought about it, it would gnaw away at him (especially once his buddies said, "I can't believe your dad yelled at you like that").

Could that have been what happened to LeBron? Did those eight seconds shake his confidence beyond repair? Did he resent Wade for embarrassing him? Did he think to himself, "Fine, you want to act like this is your team, then YOU win this title?" I believe every basketball champion needs a pecking order of sorts; that's just what the history of the league told us. Miami tried to cheat this concept by putting two of the league's best three players on the same team. It worked for 8½ months; LeBron and Wade ran the team together and deferred to one another depending on the moment. Then the Finals rolled around, Wade kicked it up another gear, LeBron didn't do the same, Wade called him out … and the team was NEVER the same. These are the facts.

6:42: Just wanted to commemorate this moment: Miami down three, gets a rebound and gets the ball to LeBron on the right side of the key, with J.J. Barea defending him one-on-one … and LeBron turns and throws a pass 20 feet backwards to Wade at midcourt. A few seconds later, Miami gives it back to LeBron, who reluctantly backs Barea down to the low post … and bowls him over. Offensive foul. All hail the King!

(Note that's too important to be a footnote: If that sequence alone isn't enough to inspire LeBron to lock himself in a gym all summer until he emerges with a spin move, a jump hook, and a Jordan-eseque fallaway, then he's the biggest waste of talent in NBA history. You know at the car wash when they offer the "everything" package? That's what God gave LeBron. He's threatening to waste it. In a nutshell, this is what makes us so angry about him. It's not The Decision, or his lack of self-awareness, or the fact that he's a front-runner … it's that he's blowing the "everything" car-wash package. You see an athlete get handed the "everything" package maybe only five times in your life.)

Passed along by a friend of mine in NBA circles: LeBron caved from the never-ending scrutiny (as brutal as any athlete has ever faced) and his shaky inner circle, which consists of one parent (his mother, who battled a ton of problems over the years), his high school friends (who assumed an inordinately crucial role in his life without any real experience), his agents (who never threw their bodies in front of "The Decision"), and Miami's management (who walked him into another fiasco with the Heat's Welcome Party). By all accounts, he's a genuinely nice and happy guy who just wants to be liked — he was never meant to be a villain, and as much as he tried to feed off the heat (no pun intended), once it piled up past a certain point, he broke. Maybe he felt that happening against the 2010 Celtics as well; maybe that's why he chose to play with Wade in the first place.

And maybe that's why, right now, he's in total denial. Even in the postgame presser, when he should have been devastated the same way Magic Johnson was distraught after coming up small in the 1984 Finals, LeBron was doing the Frank Drebin "Nothing to see here, please disperse" routine, bristling at the notion that he choked and taking shots at anyone who rooted against him. That's what you do when you're surrounded by enablers — you blame everyone else, and you never look within. He never understood that people only rooted against him because that's what you do when someone boasts before they've ever actually done anything.

I just started nba2k11 with sliders on All Star. I'm 7-39, but I am starting to figure it out on offense and a little on team defense. One on one defense on a point guard is hard for me. Shooting is hard too. I have the shoot thing lit green a lot now and I still miss a lot of shots. Frustrating to miss wide open threes with guys like K-Martin and Budinger. I don't know how the heck to shoot yet, just trying to time it and hope for the best, but I got the hang of pick and roll and post up plays pretty good. Need to learn how to drive and make layups now after the D decides to shut other plays down. Double teams are challenging for me because I cannot hit an open jumper. Overall reawarding game thus far, and feel like when I actually do nba stuff like running plays I improve. I've loaded the opposing teams up with Magic Johnson, Larry Bird ect, so getting killed, but hopefully my number one draft pick will move me up the ladder next year and I can compete. Good game. Addictive.

Yeah. People assume that Lebron is going to break every scoring record... but once he loses a step or 2 and can't drive/dunk over and over- he's going to be in a lot of trouble. I see him fading as fast as Shawn Kemp did.

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